A poser: Is losing your domain name, even temporarily, analogous to losing your driver’s license?
Every year about this time, a month before renewal, my domain registrar always seems to screw things up with my domain name. (The cowpi.com part of the address.) And as a result, my website goes off line for a couple days. Fortunately, it appears this year, my website was off line for only a day. Last year, it was down for ten days. (Technically, my website was not off line. It was still there. All you need is the 12-digit IP address to access it.)
It is something different every year. This time, somehow they managed to mangle my credit card number. So it kicked me into the group that must pay by invoice and check (with an additional $5 inconvenience handling fee). The invoice payment must be received 30 days before the expiration date. Okay, I can accept that, except, the invoice was emailed exactly 30 days before the expiration date—the day it was due! Go figure.
My dad, who just retired from over 35 years of programming in the business world (he started in the 1960s on an IBM 360), would chalk it up to poor management of “programming by committee.” He wouldn’t be surprised. He was always complaining about sloppy programming. The attitude of most managers now days seems to be to rush projects into productions after a bare minimum of testing, and then they’ll manage the bugs. Unfortunately, customers and phone support people have to clean up the human side of the programmers’ mistakes.
Oh well. Life goes on…in cyberspace…